It’s actually not about time but about energy levels.
To be able to accomplish this, you setup your life to have maximal energy level balance throughout the day.
For me that meant to unfortunately leave my girlfriend at home almost every evening the past year to get a few hours in almost everyday until I was done.
This also included eating the same food (ready made from Lidl) everyday and just saying no to everything and everyone all the time.
I also recommend that you try to take as little responsibility you can at work and perhaps working from home if possible, where you then use half the day for your own stuff.
One of the few benefits of this lifestyle/endeavour is that you have an income while trying your startup idea.
Was it worth it in the end for you?
Spent around $50k of my own money to seed fund it.
Demo video: https://youtu.be/SOPZ8-Ptk2E
Have you considered launching on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site?
Demo video: https://youtu.be/SOPZ8-Ptk2E
How did you find a manufacturer willing to build your product? Did you negotiate the price per unit?
Do they require a minimum purchase amount (ie, like 1000 units)?
If you do not have enough backers, are you planning on using your own money to buy up to the minimum purchase number, or cancel the entire project?
How do you plan on validating the build quality before settling on a specific manufacturer to build your product?
We have already built a final prototype that looks and works like final product together with our plastics manufacturer. Circuit boards from Pcbway currently but larger order will come from other company most likely. Again there are many. And same with injection moulding; lots of companies do it.
I think we will reach crowdfunding goals but if not we may get external funding.
I finished out 2020 with a decent profit, and am now working towards learning the Xcode/Swift environment for iOS. I subscribed to a course on Udemy, and do an hour a day.
Most people are under the impression that having a successful side business requires an additional 40 hours a week. Find something you're passionate about, see if you can make money by doing it, and take a long-term approach to building up the skills required to be successful.
How you live each day is how you live your life. The small investments everyday add up!
One thing is that my day job did not demand heroic hours, and I have a very short commute. I live in a cheap region, so I have plenty of space in my house for all operations.
Another factor is that the market itself is such that my business will never grow beyond a certain size. I make and ship a few gadgets a week. I'm successful inasmuch as the business adds a few thousand dollars per year to the kitty. Playing music has also produced a net income if you don't count what my parents paid for lessons. ;-)
An interesting nuance is that my product contains no Code. My market doesn't judge my credibility by the sophistication of my web page. It is not technically passive income, but semi-passive in the sense that the baseline attention it demands is utterly predictable from month to month.
The lack of Code is by intent, to provide a contrast with what I do all day.
In the second case I negotiated a 4 day work week. That helped me stay sane, but the one day on / six days off cadence made it hard to build momentum.
Putting in a little work on the side every day, as other commenters suggest, is probably the way to go. But it’s a different (and to me less rewarding) kind of work that can be done in small increments. Probably not deep work. Choose your business idea and responsibilities accordingly! And be patient.
> If you have, how did you do it?
I do side projects for 2 major reasons: to build something I'd like to use myself, and to learn/practice tech skills that I can't at my day job. Its just about consistently making a little time every week to move things forward.
Maybe it was only possible in the last decade (2009-2020) due to the stock market being in a valley when I started investing a large percentage of my income each year, but I now make 6 figures a year in dividends and capital gains from my investments in S&P funds. I did live frugally and sacrificed a lot, and it probably helped that I do not have a family nor a mortgage.
Because I still live way beneath my means, this "business" continues to grow exponentially year after year, and I'll be able to retire pretty comfortably in my mid 40's (estimate). It takes very little of my time (compared to an actual business like Ebay reselling or some small SAAS that I could create). I know it's not the type of side-hustle many on this site imagine, but it probably is more feasible for those who don't have any million-dollar ideas, don't want to put in the time and energy into a high-risk venture, and already enjoy (or can tolerate) their day job that pays well enough.
The best resource I can think of right now is something like Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/. There are various sister subs that are more specific to the lifestyle you want. Getting started earlier - in your 20s, especially if you make a decent engineer's salary with low cost lifestyle - is the biggest advantage you have over everyone else.
I was able to leave my full time job and go all in on my own business about a year later and have been self employed ever since.
It just takes a lot of patience, motivation and a willingness to give up some of your free time.
Working out helps me a lot and allows me to refresh and get more capacity. Sure, there are days where I'm squeezed out, but enough sleep also helps. What I've also learned is, use anything you have to, to get the job done and don't focus on optimization and scaling problems at all. Make sure to throw away features that don't add any value now and always keep that in mind. If you are careful about these points, you can certainly accelerate.
We have no kids yet, but planning for one this year. I know it would get tight to work on side projects with a kid while being actively employed, but it is still very possible to get it all going. We just need to optimize a lot, and learn to ignore/skip unimportant things. I know a few people who have run companies with little babies in their families.A lot of people I've met in the Bay Area successfully did it with 2 kids and a wife and a full-time job. Your side projects don't have to stop with kids coming. One thing I know that would help is, find a lightweight job while you're fiddling with side projects. That will help ease it up a lot. Another tip, wake up early in the day at 5:30AM or so. It will give you a lot of time on a super sharp mind.
I think it is doing "these 2 jobs" that is the main problem here. If my side project spawned into a company that I am able to let go of my full-time job, I am sure I'd get extra time to dedicate to my family. I am frankly looking forward to that day. In your situation, it would be your job to speak your heart out with your wife. Regardless of how financially viable your side projects are, they are still something you enjoy and you must communicate this to her clearly. She should be able to understand AFAICS.
I regret not doing this sooner when I was single, but I am doing it at least now. I am more experienced and more skilled today than I ever was.
I’m hoping to recapture that with my new side project, Perligo. I haven’t launched yet, so we’ll see how it goes. But my main advice would be start small. Small things don’t take a ton of time. Graphite was super small at first. Grow as your time allows.
I launched https://travelmap.net 7 years ago while working full time and stopped my job 3 years later to work on it full time
BTW, despite all the issues that 2020 & covid brought us, next week we're launching our v2: https://solokeys.com/v2.
The "mistake" we did initially is that we didn't account for enough extra inventory. I mean, with the KS money you have to 1) fulfill the backers, 2) create additional inventory to sell. But at a certain point while you're selling your inventory you need to start manufacturing another batch and you need money for that. Tl;dr: 3x your production costs, don't 2x them.
It's not a huge issue, but that means you can do a smaller 2nd batch and you risk to run out of stock, which we did.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good problem to have... it's just extra work and we could have optimized better.
I assumed your company was much larger than a side project, so great work! I’ve been recommending it to friends.
My only feedback is that I’d love to have some kind of waterproof casing beyond the silicone cover that I could put on it - I keep it on my key ring and living in the UK my pockets do get wet in the rain.
The v2 is water resistant, we sealed all components in a layer of epoxy.
For v1 there's still a layer of epoxy on the components. As long as you dry it before usage, a bit of water shouldn't damage it. Or if you feel adventurous you can try sealing it with some glue or epoxy.
P.S: I called it side business in the sense that it started as a side business. Then thankfully it grew into a company.
I've made plenty of mistakes. It has evolved tremendously over time. It's now almost completely passive, and by adjusting a few levers could be profitable. But it does not - and likely will not - have scale. It also has vulnerabilities that I "can't" (read: won't) address while also working FT.
So it's hard to say objectively whether it's successful. But as a learning experience it has been worth its weight in gold. The diverse hard and soft skills you accumulate in the course of keeping your side hustle afloat while spending minimal money are endlessly valuable. Most of them come from learning the hard way. But that's what makes them stick. I've applied some of these skills and lessons learned to newer projects with positive results.
A few takeaways:
1.) If you can sift through the mountains of B.S., there is extremely high-quality, free content available to learn about building and scaling startups (e.g. YC Startup School, books, etc.). So not knowing what to do, per se, is not the issue. The real issue is knowing what hard-but-necessary things you should probably do, but not doing them.
2.) So, about those hard-but-necessary things. Working a "day job" and coming home to your side business can be exhausting. This exhaustion can further discourage you from doing the necessary things to grow your startup. To overcome motivation draughts and other mental hurdles, it's helpful to have some combination of the following: A.) a co-founder to share the load, B.) added accountability, e.g. employees, investors, C.) a valuable network with the resources or knowledge to pull you past certain plateaus, and/or D.) extreme passion and enthusiasm for the category / business.
3.) The ultimate challenge is finding balance. Yes, you will need to make sacrifices. But the experience forces you to be acutely aware of how you allocate your energy and attention. For example: Does spending a few hours per week exercising actually provide a net-positive affect on overall productivity? Does 20 minutes of clear-headed morning work before commuting accomplish as much as 1 hour of exhausted, post-commute work? While we're at it, is there "dead time" you could be using to work on your side business (e.g. commuting, watching Netflix, sitting on your phone waiting for food, etc.)? Are you already over-committed and stretched at work? Could you talk to your boss about your workload, find someone to delegate to, or negotiate a more flexible work arrangement? Are you spending an hour most nights with your significant other but your mind is elsewhere, or are you spending forty-five min where you're totally present? The list goes on. This exercise in itself is valuable even if your startup ultimately fails.
4.) Finally, in my experience, you can build a profitable product and achieve PMF while working a day job. These things require mostly a good tactics and knowledge (see #1). The true hurdle becomes scale. Scale requires resources - you could throw money at it, but that's rarely sustainable. It's better to use your time, ingenuity, sweat equity, and enthusiasm and hope the flywheel starts turning. But these are in short supply when you're already contending with a day job and other priorities. You can optimize your days (see #3). You can put controls in place to contend with inevitable hurdles (see #2).
5.) Ultimately, you need to define what success looks like for your side-business. Whatever your goal, day job or not, value comes from finding and solving the most interesting and commercially viable problem you can. Without this, the challenges of running a side business while working FT grow exponentially.